Ninja Assassin review

I'm not one of those people who've jumped on the meem band wagon about zombies or ninjas or any of that crap. Generally I love kung-fu genre pictures and most of the ones we get now in American are either rather mediocre Asian ones of DVD or more kid friendly ones in theaters. But enter a rag tag film making force... James McTeigue (director of "V for Vendetta" and second unit director of 'The Matrix" trilogy and "Speed Racer"), legendary producer Joel Silver along with the Wachowski brothers and co-writer J. Michael Straczynski; writer of "Changeling". Their plan, to make an A-movie out of a B-movie premise. Said premise is that ninja still exist and have been operating and carrying out assassinations for centuries. Now two Europol agents are getting too close and one rogue ninja seeks to protect them and kill his former master.

That's about as B-movie as it gets and no this never becomes an A-movie sadly enough. However it does accomplish being a very fun and entertaining B-movie that belongs on a list of modern grindhouse films. Korean pop star and co-star of "Speed Racer" Rain plays Raizo, the rogue ninja that disobeyed his clan and is trying to track them down to finish them all off. Naomie Harris ('Miami Vice' and '28 Days Later') plays Mika, the agent Raizo is protecting because as crazy as she sounds, she has indeed figured out what's going on. And what is going on? Well the film's got holes. Lots of holes. So they do their damnedest to film them up with blood... a lot of blood.

Personally I've never been big on CGI blood. Scorsese and Fincher are two of the few that have used it well in their recent films, but in major action fair it doesn't look as well as it should. So congratulations McTeigue and company for actually making it work. The need for it in some films makes sense. By doing it with computers you're able to save set up and clean up time and take as many shots as you need. It saves times, man power and money For "Ninja Assassin" however I imagine the clean up would've been the biggest issue. There's more blood squirting here than in "Kill Bill" and if a take when wrong, it seems like it would take hours and hours to get it all clean up for the second take. A lot attention is put into th CGI blood, so it looks good. Not amazing, but good. What really aids however is the pick-up scenes with real blood soaked into the hands of the killer and splashed across the walls.

There are multiple sequences of highly kinetic action set pieces that are over the top and ridiculous, but so joyfully created that you can't help but enjoy the ride. Ever seen ninjas fight an army of well armed soldiers? No? Well now's your chance! I've noticed that a lot of the over the top films of 2009 have gone either unnoticed or simply unloved. Something I find sad. People in the news world and magazine world bitch and moan about getting these kinds of films; then they complain that they're stupid. So others get made that have the action take a back seat to characters and story. Where realism over takes myth, so they say it's disappointing and boring. And the worst part is that the public is starting to listen to that. They'll talk smack about a film like 'Crank: High Voltage' because it didn't make a ton of money (however it did do well), but despite how terrible a film "New Moon" is they'll never lay into it too hard because it's made a boat load of cash. Perhaps it's just me, but I don't want crazy idea, genre pictures to die in favor of softer, tween age re imaginings of those ideas.

"Ninja Assassin" *** out of ****